The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was the ultimate in rude awakenings: In the early morning hours of April 18, residents were jolted awake by a 5:12 a.m. pre-shock. They scarcely had time to process what had happened when 25 seconds later, a major earthquake rocked the region for a full 60 seconds. The quake and its ensuing fires made for one of the most devastating disasters in American history.
A colorized photograph of the destruction left behind after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (gettyimages)
As is evident in this colorized photograph of the aftermath, the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 caused widespread destruction. Today’s seismologists estimate that the quake was an 8.0 on the Richter Scale. Buildings that survived the initial quake were then at risk for the fires that raged through the fallen city for days afterwards. Reports of the time claimed that 3,000 people perished in the disaster, but modern researchers and historians believe that number to be much higher. Let’s look at the destruction left behind after the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
San Francisco, the Paris of the West
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake was the first natural disaster to be photographed. (britannica.com)
San Francisco was born as a mining outpost for all the get-rich-quick prospectors that rushed to California in the mid-1800s looking for gold. While other mining towns shriveled up and died, San Francisco flourished, thanks to its idyllic location on the San Francisco Bay. The city by the bay became a key shipping port and trade center. As the city grew, it attracted many successful and wealthy business owners that helped transform the economy of San Francisco. With money, came luxury. San Francisco grew into an important setting for the arts and entertainment. Famous writers, including Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Robert Louis Stevenson, lived there. They wrote many of their famous works in San Francisco and hobnobbed with the cities rich and famous. San Francisco was such a prosperous city that it earned the nickname the “Paris of the West”.
The San Andreas Fault
San Francisco sits along the San Andreas Fault. (archive.gov)
The residents of San Francisco in the early 1900s had no idea that their city sat on the infamous San Andreas Fault. Although the idea of plate tectonics was not widely accepted by the scientific community until the 1960s, there were scientists that suspected that earthquakes were caused by the movements of the Earth’s crust. In 1895, a geologist from UC Berkeley named Andrew Lawson identified the San Andreas Fault in northern California. He had no idea that the fault line was actually 750 miles long. The two tectonic plates had pulled apart where Professor Lawson was doing his study and a valley had formed because of it. A small lake at the floor of the valley was already named San Andreas Lake to Lawson named the fault line after that feature. After the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, Lawson rightly concluded that the San Andreas Fault extended much further south than he originally thought.
A Powerful Quake
The wooden Victorian homes were vulnerable to the earthquake. (abc7news.com)
The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was powerful enough to be felt in Oregon, Los Angeles, and well into central Nevada. Many of the wooden Victorian houses and brick storefronts of the city were damaged or destroyed. The toppled buildings caused fires to start that spread quickly. Firefighters couldn’t extinguish the flames. They didn’t have access to water because of broken water mains and they couldn’t even get to some of the fires because of all the debris blocking the streets. Two days after the quake, when the fires got too bad, the mayor of San Francisco ordered the evacuation of 20,000 people in the line of fire to take refuge on the USS Chicago docked in the bay. In total, more than 3,000 buildings were destroyed.
The Loss of Life
Fires raged for several days. (britannica.com)
There is much debate about the true death toll from the Great San Francisco Earthquake. At the time of the disaster, newspapers reported that 700 people died in the initial earthquake in San Francisco, with another 165 deaths in nearby San Jose and Santa Rosa. Most historians believe that number was greatly under reported. They estimate the true death toll to be closer to 3,000 people. Additionally, more than half of San Francisco’s population, roughly 225,000 people, were left homeless after the disaster.
The Role of Photography
Ives's color photos of the disaster. (smithsonian.com)
The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 has the distinction of being the first natural disaster to be photographed. Photos of the damage were printed in newspapers across the country. One photographer, Frederick Eugene Ives, even snapped some color photographs of the damage. Modern researchers have been able to study all the photographs, like the colorized image at the start of this article, of the aftermath of the earthquake to learn more about the disaster and the damage. It has helped them to add to their understanding of this event, fault lines, and the nature of earthquakes in general.
Bouncing Back from Disaster
Photos of the earthquake aftermath have been a valuable resource for scientists. (archives.gov)
Novelist Jack London was one of the well-known writers in San Francisco when the earthquake hit. He wrote, “San Francisco is gone.” It may have seemed like it at the time, but London greatly underestimated the tenacity of the people of the city by the bay. Within a few weeks of the earthquake, many of the businesses in San Francisco reopened. The banks were back in business within six weeks. As clean up efforts progressed, San Francisco’s iconic cable cars returned. The entire rebuilding process took about nine years.
